International MBA Program
Internship Web Journal
Katherine White
IMBA Class of 2008
C.A.R.E., La Paz, Bolivia
katherine_white@moore.sc.edu
Journal Entry #3 - July 6, 2007:
I am a "dynamic entity with many dimensions." So are you. At least, that's what my Birkman report says. It says that everyone has unique strengths, and that understanding and using them can be a major key to success. The Birkman Method is a centerpiece of the Moore School’s Graduate Career Management Office, and something that I believe is truly special. The idea is that while the hard skills involved in marketing and finance and operations are clearly and inherently important to business, an oft-neglected priority is self-awareness. The key to success isn’t just the right education and the right experience, but (especially in management) the ability to get the best out of yourself and others. This is a field where everyone has room to grow, and the Birkman offers a framework to encourage that growth. Not only am I improving on skills that will make me a better employee, but I’m more targeted in my career search, looking for work that I know I will enjoy and feel comfortable with. The Birkman helps me see my own strengths as well as those of the people I’m working with, and the challenges that we’ll have working with each other. The Birkman has been an exciting tool for me from day one, and becomes more useful every day. I am a believer.
The Birkman report that Moore students receive is an individualized 50-page long profile that includes our "usual" behavior, our "needs" and "stress" behavior, and some amazing number of other personality components. The Graduate Career Management Office staff spent hours with us over the course of the semester, reviewing our reports with us and helping us find our meaning in them.
These brief descriptions aren’t about one’s activities, but about our approaches. As a yellow "usual," I will never be an accountant (a typical yellow job), but when I bake a cake, manage a project, or plan my weekend, I want to find the inner logic to it. I also know that I need to know who’s in charge, but I need that person to give me my space, and that I need variety in my routine. If that doesn’t happen, I’m going to get chatty and stubborn. It’s not necessarily the most comfortable process of getting to know oneself, but it’s incredibly useful.
What I love most about the Birkman Method is that, while it takes into account one’s challenges (see above), it really emphasizes strengths. In fact, by going back to your strengths, you can start to overcome your challenges. Lately I’ve felt unmotivated at work. My Birkman says I need a supervisor who gives feedback (positive or negative); my supervisor has been on vacation. I’m not one to let a book tell me what’s up, but I tried it on, and it fit. So how do I get my motivation back? By going back to what I know and am good at: make lists, set objectives, draw up a schedule, and go. So I’ve had a really productive week, and I’m happy about that.
The main reason I was inspired to write about the Birkman this month is that it has come in additionally handy in an international context. Our international management class last autumn helped draw out some cultural clues to watch out for – how communication occurs, what the orientations toward time and community are, etc. Primarily, on the communication piece, I can very primitively assign “Latin” culture as Birkman green (characterized by conversations and enthusiasm) and “ USA” culture as yellow (bullet points and schedules). Other arguments could be made, but this is a framework that works for me, and helps me work in a different culture. I know if I tried to do business the Bolivian way, I would be an unhappy failure. I noticed in my first few meetings with Bolivians that they hadn’t prepared ahead of time – I had once sent an e-mail to a colleague with attachments and lists and objectives, which she printed out and read for the first time in my presence. I tried once to not prepare for a meeting, and the results were painful. In the end, I stayed true to my yellow self. I still prepare for meetings in Bolivia. I make a list of items and clarifications. When we hit on a topic during a meeting, I check it off, and bring up the rest when convenient, or at the end. I can still follow the natural human flow that the encounter takes, while understanding myself enough to know what I need in the situation. I do a lot of translation, which is a difficult task for me considering not the language component but the cultural one. Spanish, I think, is notorious for paragraph-long sentences. The flow of the piece is important. In translating the language, I often have the opportunity to translate culture, drawing out the meaning in the flow that was formerly so important. My yellow self loves this goal; getting there is harder. Instead of being overwhelmed by a lot of text that feels inaccessible to me, I developed a process. Yellow all over the place. It makes my days easier and better.
There’s no easy conclusion to this journal. Learning the Birkman as a tool has been really exciting for me, and I know it will continue to be helpful throughout my life and career. I’m not sure if this entry holds meaning to anyone but me. But like I said, I’m a believer, and I just wanted to spread the word.
Ciao,
Kate
Journal Entry #2 - June 11, 2007:
What a month!
Since my arrival I
have had my hands on three proposals, translated countless pages, visited field projects, received
my intrepid advisor on a visit, and even starred in a video. Woohoo!!
While I still am (and imagine always will be) filling in where needed on random assignments (see: starred in a video), my scope of work is now a bit more defined. My primary assignment is a study on PROCOSI, a Bolivian network of 33 national and international health NGOs.
Primarily for the benefit of the network itself (not CARE), the project will map the organizational behavior of the network; identify common areas of intervention, strengths, and weaknesses; and make recommendations in light of the findings. I'll be working closely with a representative of the national PROCOSI office as well as conducting interviews with the 33 member organizations in order to achieve this. I'll also be assisting with the launch of Friends of PROCOSI, a US-based non-profit meant to diversify the funding base of PROCOSI, among other aims. This has/will entail the production of marketing materials in English and other support as needed. Beyond PROCOSI, support remains a key word, as I will be working with the education program and other projects in various stages. This will include documenting projects, preparing and presenting business plan workshops to student in the alternative education programs, and, of course, the ever-popular translation.
CARE Bolivia is my first international (and indeed, first large) NGO that I have worked with, and that has been an adventure. One of the biggest logistical challenges, it seems, is the language issue. Being in Bolivia, and having Bolivian employees, CARE Bolivia operates in Spanish. However, as an international NGO working with international funding agencies, CARE must turn in nearly all proposals, reports, and other documents in English. There are a fair number of bilingual (at least) staff in the office, but it means there is a lot of time spent in translation, which I certainly did in May. I've also found the idea of "translation" goes beyond the official documents, as there is often a cultural shift that needs to happen for an audience in the US versus one in Bolivia. PROCOSI, for example, has a fair share of documents already in existence that could be used for Friends of PROCOSI, and I was asked not only to help put those in English, but also to put them in "American" – which changes not only the language, but the information used and how it's presented. My approach to the work has changed, too – I have real relationships with the people I'm working with (and I don't have to be on time to meetings, which I love). These were all things I knew before, from personal experience and my classes both in Columbia and Mexico, but really living in and working in it is so impacting.
Exciting things are happening out of the office, too, and those are the photos here. I traveled with some of the CARE staff to Tarija, the southernmost department, and visited projects in the field there. That was my first real experiences with the communities and the projects of CARE, and it was amazing. There are people living in the mountains at 4,000 meters, where hardly anything grows, in communities that would hardly qualify as villages. The homes (and the clinic) are mud huts with no electricity or water, the enclosures for the sheep and llamas are made of stone, and boy is it cold. But here and there are shining spots, like a woman in the clinic pointing out her daughter's weight on a communal tracking chart, a man showing off the greenhouse where he helps grow food for the community, and a weaving co-op where goods are made for export and the income supports local families. It was an amazing trip.
Meanwhile last
weekend was jam-packed. Saturday in La Paz was the festival of the Gran Poder, an apparent infusion
of Christian and Aymara (indigenous) lore culminating in a day-long parade of dancing and music and
color. As you can see, participation is not optional. Sunday marked the arrival of Louis
Dessau, our advisor from the Moore School (seen here with fellow IMBA Jacalyn, also at
CARE). We were the first stop on his abbreviated trip to Latin America, trying to visit all of
us on our internships. He braved the elevation and took us to Lake Titicaca, which is according to
some the world's highest navigable lake, and according to everyone is huge and amazing! We had
fresh trout on the lake shore, then ambled back to La Paz for dinner with the CARE country
director, Barbara, who is nothing short of amazing. The next day was all business as Louis met with
Barbara about the internship program in the morning and with a few other organizations in the
afternoon. We sent him off to Lima on Tuesday.
So, a long entry, but it was an amazing month. I love Bolivia, and I have moments where I realize I'm doing the work I always wanted to do. There are challenges, and questions I have for myself about if that's where my future is, but that's the beauty of an internship – it's a taste test. And I'm happy, so that's nice too.
Journal Entry #1 - May 7, 2007:
Every story about La Paz starts with the trip into town, winding down from the highlands – and in my case, from the airport – on steep cobbled roads into the foggy crater where La Paz sits. Even at 3,600 meters, this highest capital city in the world has a lot above it.
I am here to work with CARE Bolivia. According to the 2001 census, 58% of Bolivia's population lives in poverty; that is to say, without the ability to satisfy their basic needs. CARE Bolivia is part of CARE International, an international humanitarian organization, and has been here since 1976, contributing to "a country of hope, tolerance, and social justice, in which poverty has been overcome and the people live with dignity and security and exercising their rights" (CARE Bolivia vision statement). They do this through emergency relief, influencing policy, promoting human rights, providing economic opportunity, and strengthening the capacity for self-help. And I am psyched!
I have never
worked for an organization this big before. Even though my office is relatively small, with
about 30 people, the reach of the projects is impressive. My background is with
education and anti-violence programs, so I feel right at home here, but I came to Moore because I
had so much to learn. On the one hand, there are the management and strategic skills that I
hadn't directly been exposed to before when I was doing direct work with clients. Meanwhile,
I am interested in working with NGOs, but I chose business school – people get business.
Economy is unquestionably linked with development. The student body is so diverse that I
always am learning something from my classmates. So this whole education is an awesome
challenge for me. It's exciting, now, to be in a situation where I will get to try my hand at
what I've been learning the past 10 months, see how an international NGO works, and be in an
environment where people really speak my language (well, ok, they speak mostly Spanish, but you
know what I mean).
At this point I've only been in the office for three days, and my work is not yet completely defined, so these are my very early impressions. CARE works on a project-by-project basis, and I will be contributing to a few of those. Currently there are several projects wrapping up, which means the actual wrap-up work as well as the preliminary work for new proposals and projects. I will be working on a few of those, mostly in education. Keep in mind that "education" at CARE doesn't just mean teaching in the classroom; it ranges from affecting policy change continent-wide to special community projects to keep kids in school and out of dangerous mining jobs. However, my primary work as I understand it will be working in an alliance of health-related NGOs, documenting their best practices and identifying networking opportunities. The end result of this will be a stakeholder analysis, which I hope will help contribute to more effective health projects in the future – not just in CARE but in NGOs country-wide.
As I write this, my first weekend in Bolivia is approaching. I haven't yet had time to get to know the city and hope to explore a bit. Every story about La Paz starts with the trip into town… but from there they all go somewhere completely different.
Ciao ciao